John 15:1-6 (Part 1): The Fruitless Vine

Well, today we begin a new chapter in John's Gospel, which is only the 14th time that this has happened in two and a half years of being in John's Gospel.

We're going at a Martin Lloyd Jones pace, if you know the reference. Brief summary of John so far, he begins his book within the beginning, and the reason he begins within the beginning is because he's telling a new story of a new creation.

Not an old creation, but a new creation where sin and death are going to eventually be a eliminated.

He's going to redeem his people. The old world of idolatry and brokenness is going to be crushed at the feet of Jesus Christ, and we're going to have new life in his name.

He begins his Gospel within the beginning because he's telling the story of a new creation. Now he begins that first ministry week, and if you look in John 1, the first seven days of that first week are enumerated, which is again a tip of the hat back to Genesis.

He picks his disciples in that first week. And then he goes into the town of Cana, and he does his first sign, miracle, where he made the water into wine.

And then he does something utterly astounding, and he goes to Jerusalem, and he overturns the tables of the tax collectors and chases out the money changers, and he overturns this religious complex that was dominating the landscape of Jerusalem at Herod's temple.

And that, in John 2, alerts us to a theme that is going to be pervasive all throughout the

Gospel of John. It's going to bubble up under the surface of John's Gospel where Christ is going to replace old covenantal norms.

He's going to come, and he's going to take upon himself things that were true in the old covenant. He's going to reclaim them for himself and for his glory.

For instance, in John 2, the Herodian temple. The temple is where the people of God came to offer their tithes and their offerings and to participate in religious festivals and to sacrifice so that they could be forgiven of their sins.

And Jesus comes to replace that temple. He says that in three days, you can tear this temple down, and the third day, the temple will be rebuilt.

And they're like, well, it took 47 years to build this temple. How are you going to do that? He's talking about a different temple, the temple of his body.

He came to replace that old dusty building with the living, breathing, tabernacling presence of God that would be indwelled in us by the power of the

Holy Spirit. He came to overthrow the temple. He also came to overthrow the old birth. All of us in this room have been born in the old birth.

I pray that everyone in this room has been born of the new birth. In John 3, he says that he's bringing a new birth.

John 4, he says that he's going to replace the old wells. The woman at the well said, you know, this is

Jacob's well, and we drink from this, and we're special because of that, and we know what Abraham said, and all of this. And Jesus says, a time is coming is now here where the true worshiper is going to worship the

Father in spirit and in truth, and those old wells, you're not going to need anymore because I'm going to be a fountain of living water that's going to supply all of your needs.

He's going to replace the old wells. John 5, he's going to replace the Sabbath. He walks up to the man who had been sick for 38 years, which is the same 38 -year period that Israel wandered in the wilderness, and he heals this man on the

Sabbath. And as an act of gratitude for all that Jesus has done, the man turns him into the

Pharisees. And the Pharisees are so angry that Jesus is violating the

Sabbath that they want to kill Jesus. And Jesus, the Synoptic Gospels even looks at them and says,

I am Lord of the Sabbath. He's overturning their own understanding of what the Sabbath is.

He's fulfilling it in himself. He's the Sabbath, rest of God. John 6, he's replacing the

Exodus. You remember after the people leave the Red Sea and they go into the wilderness and they're fed by God with the manna from heaven,

Jesus is the true God who feeds his people with multiplied bread. And he breaks the bread and he hands it out and he's saying,

I am the true Exodus. I'm the true God from the Exodus. He overthrows the feast in John 7 -8, specifically the

Feast of Tabernacle saying that I am the light of the world, that I am the living water. Those two fundamental functions of the

Feast of Tabernacles, he's saying, is me. He does this with the Passover. He does this with the

Day of Atonement. He's basically saying that all of that old covenantal stuff was all about me.

And now that I'm here, the shadow can go away. The type can go away. In the

Synoptic Gospels and Paul, we see that he's the true priest. He's the true king. He's the true prophet.

He's the true sacrifice. He's the true and better Moses. As Pastor Derek alluded to earlier, in him are the words of life.

So what Jesus is doing, yes, he's coming to save sinners, but he's coming to overturn the world and to overturn all the old covenantal norms so that people will find their hope in him from that moment forward.

Claiming those things for himself. Now today we're going to see this theme show up in a surprising way of Jesus reclaiming those things for himself.

And we need to look under the hood of this passage a little bit because this is a hallmark passage.

What's a hallmark passage? Hallmark passage is passages that we put on hallmark cards and we think we know what they mean.

But there's so much more that's going on under the surface of this passage that we're going to need to look at today.

Now we can't cover everything. If you've been at Shepherd's Church for a while, you'll realize that it's par norm for us to go multiple weeks on the same passage.

This is part one of two on this passage. And today we're going to look under the surface and we're going to see the judgment that is brewing under the surface of this passage.

Jesus says, I'm the vine. I'll give you fruit. I'll bless you. Yes, those things are true. And we'll look at those next week.

But under that, there's also judgment, condemnation, covenantal curses that we have to look at this morning.

So to do that, we're going to look at four things. The outline is also in your bulletin if you'd like for your convenience.

But the four things that we're going to be looking at this morning is that God is the vine dresser. And that term goes all the way back to Judah.

Number two, God intends for Judah to be his faithful, fruitful vine. And yet in the course of redemptive history, we see that they were not faithful and fruitful, that they became fruitless in their sin.

And they are the fruitless vine. And then number four, we're going to look at how Judah will be given over to fiery judgment.

And as we conclude today, we're going to look at a warning, but also a hope that you and I can cling to as the people of God.

So if you will, turn with me to John 15, chapter 15, verses one through six, as we explore this theme together.

John 15, one through six. The passage begins this way.

I am the true vine. My father is the vine dresser.

Every branch in me that does not bear fruit, he takes away. And every branch that bears fruit, he prunes it so that it may bear more fruit.

You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in me and I in you.

As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in me.

I am the vine and you are the branches. And he who abides in me and I in him, he bears much fruit.

For apart from me, you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up and they gather them and cast them into the fire and they are burned.

Let us pray. Lord, I pray today that we would catch a glimpse of all that you are saying here, at least half of what you're saying here.

A half that is often neglected and overlooked. A half that is so central to the context of this passage that we must look at it.

We must understand it. And Lord, as believers and as Christians today, let us not fall into the same temptation as the first century

Jews who did not abide in you, but were abiding in their own religion, clinging to their human customs and norms instead of clinging to the reality of Jesus Christ.

Lord, let us take that warning. Let us cling to you. And Lord, let us be a people who bear much fruit.

It's in Christ's name we pray. Amen. Now, when we get to John chapter 15, we're no longer in the upper room.

We're still in what I would like to call the upper room discourse because Jesus is still teaching them. He's still discoursing with them.

But the location has shifted. They're no longer in the upper room, but Jesus is still teaching them as they are walking.

And we know that because the scene has changed at the end of John chapter 14. If you remember in John 13, when they got to the upper room, they were eating the

Passover. Then Jesus gets down from the table and he washes their feet and he does this utterly shocking thing where he serves them in this radical way.

Then he reveals to them another shocking truth that Judas is going to be the one to betray them. And then after that, he goes on this beautiful chapter -long discourse.

John 14, probably one of the greatest chapters in the Bible out of all the 66 books and out of all the however many chapters there are, this one is filled with so much truth.

It's one of my favorite chapters. Now, I say that a lot. My favorite chapter, it tends to be

Genesis 1 through Revelation 22. But this chapter is special in so many ways. It tells us so much about who

God is. But at the end of it, and we weren't able to cover this last week, the scene changes.

Verse 31 of chapter 14 says, but so that the world may know that I love the Father, I do exactly as the

Father has commanded me. Now get up. Let us go from here. Which means that John 15 is in a different location because they've gotten up and they've left.

And this would have been very confusing to the disciples. Now they're in a season of confusion. Jesus gets down and washes their feet, which is something only a menial slave would do for the rich guest.

They were confused by that. He told them that he was leaving and that he was going back to heaven. And they're like, how are we going to execute this revolution without you?

They're going to kill us. They're going to make us public enemy number one. They were confused by that. And then he tells them to leave the upper room, which would have been one of the most confusing things that they could have heard.

Now you just, at this time, you just didn't do that. And there's a couple of reasons why they would have been confused and why you don't do that.

Number one, they had a downtown penthouse on Passover weekend. This would be like having a nice hotel in New York on New Year's Eve weekend.

There's not a lot of space. The city would have swelled from about 100 to 200 ,000 people to about a million people.

And they had a room in downtown Jerusalem that was big enough for 13 of them to spread out and eat and dine.

This would have been unheard of. They would have been living sort of in the lap of luxury here at Passover season.

Why would they leave? That's the first thing. You don't let blessings like that go to waste.

If you end up in the Ritz Carlton, you stay there, at least until you check out. Well, they also, at that time, they didn't travel at night because there was thieves and robbers who lined the streets.

They didn't have street lamps and street lights like we do today. So if you traveled at night, you were taking your life in your own hands.

You could be robbed. You could be abused. That's what the parable of the Good Samaritan is all about. Thieves and robbers lying in wait and assaulting this man.

So you just don't travel at night. You wait until the morning because the travel would have been very difficult.

The other reason is that Jesus now is public enemy number one. They're wanting to kill him.

They've got a council that's convened so that they can figure out a way to kill him. Judas has left and he's now gone to alert the authorities.

So you definitely don't want to travel in the streets of Jerusalem now because what if you run into the brute squad and they capture

Jesus in that moment and Jesus would have stuck out like a sore thumb with his 12 disciples during this

Passover season. The most common thing that you would have done is you would have stayed there just like the disciples do in Acts.

They stay in the upper room. But Jesus, as he often does, he breaks with custom.

He takes his people in places that they're not comfortable to go. How many of us have felt that way?

We're in our little Ritz Carlton place in our life. We've got things figured out.

Everything's going well for us and then all of a sudden Jesus throws an inside slider and you feel like you've just fallen on the ground.

Jesus is always taking us out of our comfort zone. He's doing that to his disciples here. He always does that to us because we don't grow in comfort.

We grow in challenge. We grow in adversity. We grow in the valleys. I lived in Colorado for a little while in the army.

There's no grass on the highest mountain peaks because there's a certain point that as you continue to go up and up and up, it's called the death line where nothing grows.

You and I want to live on the mountaintops. That's the dream. We want to climb the mountain and get to the top, but nothing grows there.

The air actually begins to become stagnant. If you're in good shape and you go to the top of Pikes Peak in Colorado Springs, you'll be out of breath getting out of your car because the air has so little oxygen.

It's dead, but it's in the valleys, the deepest valleys where the darkest hues of green grow, where the trees produce the most vibrant fruit, where the streams bubble and the animals play.

It's in the valley where things grow. Jesus often is taking his people off of their little mountaintops, putting them into purposeful valleys so that they'll grow.

That's what he's doing here in his disciples. Now, I can just imagine Peter, being who Peter is,

Peter's probably looking down every alleyway, making sure that no one's peering around the corner.

You can imagine that every little bump in the night in Jerusalem, because it's dark, would have scared the disciples.

They would have been hanging on Jesus' coattails, and you can imagine the same Jesus who just got through saying, do not let your hearts be troubled.

Their hearts were troubled. Just because Jesus commanded it does not mean his followers always get it right.

Now, they would have walked from the upper city, which is where the wealthier places were, and they would have walked down to the lower city, and they would have went down to the lowest point in the city so that they were the furthest away from the

Temple Mount. That after that, they would have walked through the Eastern Gate, which is called the

Beautiful Gate, which would have led them out of the Old City and would have led them down the hill, which would have went down into the

Kidron Valley. Now, we don't know exactly where John 15 was spoken, but it's likely that it was either spoken in the

Kidron Valley on the way, or it was communicated on the

Mount of Olives as they're walking up the long, sloping hill that would have got them up to the Mount of Olives.

It would have been a 20 to 30 -minute walk. They would have been in much better shape, so they could have had a conversation while they were walking without getting out of breath, and they would have had this conversation as they were leaving a fruitless city.

That is important. That's not coincidental. They're leaving a city that refused to bear fruit for God, and Jesus is talking about a fruitless vine.

That's not coincidental. This is the same

Jesus who came into the city just a couple days before, and they're a city that offered Him only leaves.

If you'll remember, they laid leaves on the ground, and Jesus found them fruitless. This same

Jesus who came the next day, and He cursed the fig tree. The fig tree was a parable of Jerusalem, and in Jesus cursing that fig tree and saying that that fig tree was going to be ripped up and thrown into the fire,

He was saying that this city is a fruitless city, a city that's deserving the flames.

Jesus in His final week is talking about judgment more than at any time in His life. Now from in the beginning of His ministry all the way until the last week of His life,

Jesus is preaching sermons about repent, repent for the kingdom of God has come, repent for the kingdom of God is near, but in His last week,

He is talking about judgment, judgment for Jerusalem, judgment for the fruitless city, judgment for the ones who would turn on Him and murder

Him. It's two days later after He curses the fig tree that He gets into a encounter with the

Pharisees, and He goes toe to toe with them, and He tells them that they're the problem, that they're the ones that have caused the city to become fruitless, and they're the ones that the kingdom of God was going to be ripped away from and given to a people who would bear its fruit.

In the same week, He's telling them that armies is going to surround Jerusalem, that the city was going to be set on fire. You can read it in Matthew 21 through 23, 24 and 25, this concept of Jesus bringing judgment is pervasive in His final week, and He climaxes all of this judgment language with seven specific covenantal curses, woe upon you, woe to you scribes, woe to you

Pharisees, woe to you, perfect covenantal cursing.

You look back in Deuteronomy 28, all the blessings that it is to follow the

Lord, and then right after that, you look at all of the curses that will fall upon the people who leave

God. This is being enacted upon this specific people so that Jesus could look at them and He could say that this generation will not pass away until everything that I've said is going to take place.

He even says that all of the righteous blood that was stored up from Abel, from the death of Abel all the way until the death of Zechariah, son of Barakai, who was killed between the altars by the

Pharisees. He's saying, all that wrath of God will be poured out on you, Jerusalem.

He even weeps and He says, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often have I wanted to gather you to myself? You were not willing.

So Jesus is focused on judgment all throughout His final week. He's focused on the fruitlessness of the

Jewish people all throughout His final week. And this is especially true when He gets near the

Mount of Olives. For some reason, this location was a location where Jesus talked about judgment more than any other location in all of the

Judean landscape. It's sort of fitting, too, because the Mount of Olives overlooks the city.

And you get one of the greatest vantage points of the temple, which had become this fruitless building during the 200, 300 years before Christ came, all the way up until the point that He came.

So in a sense, as you're standing on the Mount of Olives and you're looking on the city, it would be a perfect vantage point to say this is the city that has come under the wrath of God.

Now, John 15 is another example, although it's not as obvious of an example, but once we peel back the layers of it, we will see that Jesus is talking about judgment.

Now, maybe you're saying to yourself, Jesus did not come to judge.

He came to save. Amen. You're right. He did come to save. But salvation is also a declaration.

It's a declaration of those who are not saved are under the judgment of God, and those who are saved have escaped the judgment because Christ went under the judgment for you.

To say that salvation and judgment are not interconnected concepts is foolishness.

Jesus in John 15 is even alerting us to this. He's saying, I'm the true vine, which means that there's such a thing as a false vine.

He's saying that we are the branches, which has Old Testament flavor as well.

He's saying that if we're connected to Him, we will bear much fruit, which means that if we're not connected to Him, we will not bear much fruit.

And as He says in here that we will be thrown into the flames. So for a moment, let us explore the passage.

We're not going to get very far today, but I want us to see the judgment themes that are underneath this passage so that we can understand the warning that the

Jews received so that we could cling to our Christ in the way that they did not.

The first thing I want us to see in this passage is that God is the vine dresser of faithful Judah.

This is a common Old Testament imagery or image of one who takes care of a vineyard, one who takes care of the vines, one who cultivates it, shapes it, cuts it, cares for it so that it will bear much fruit.

Isaiah 5, 1 through 3 says, let me sing now for my well -beloved. This is God and the well -beloved is

Judah. Let me sing now for my well -beloved a song of my beloved concerning his vineyard.

My well -beloved had a vineyard on a fertile hill. He dug it all around, removing its stones and planted it with the choicest vine.

And he, capital H, built a tower in the middle of it and also hewed out a wine vat in it.

And then he, God, expected it to produce good grapes, but it produced only worthless ones.

And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard.

God is describing the foundation of Israel and saying, I'm the one that planted you. I'm the one that cultivated you.

I'm the one that dug up all of the Canaanite rocks that were in that area of the world and I planted you and I watered you and I cultivated you.

And my expectation is that you would bear much fruit. Now the reason that this is important is because if we're going to look at this passage rightly, we have to see that God is not just talking about us, that he had a vine before us, before the church, and that vine was not us.

It was Judah. Long before the church is ever called the vine or the branches, he gives that title to Judah.

Before he planted us and grafted us in, he had already planted them, his well -beloved vine.

He calls his people Israel well -beloved, which is a fascinating emotive even expression of care and love.

Again, before Jesus claimed to be the vine and before he claimed that we were his branches, Judah already was.

Second thing I want us to see is that God intended Judah to be a fruitful vine. He intended for them to produce fruit.

Look at Psalm 80, 8 through 11. God, you removed a vine from Egypt and you drove out the nations and you planted it and you cleared the ground before it and it took deep root and it filled the land and the mountains were covered with its shadow and the cedars of God with its bows.

And it was sending out its branches to the sea and its shoots to the river. Do you see the kind of plant that God intended

Judah to be? A vine that grew larger than the treetops, a vine that spread itself out and covered everything kind of like Georgia kudzu.

I don't know if you've ever seen, I don't think we have kudzu up here. Kudzu grows like two feet a day and it overtakes everything.

If you have it, I'm sorry, it's going to be really difficult for you to get rid of it. It is amazing, resilient, robust sort of plant.

That's what he's talking about, a vine that overtakes everything. That was his purpose, that Israel, that Judah would be this great vine that would bear fruit, that would spread out.

And why would he want the vine to spread out like that? Because he intended to feed the nations.

God was never just solely concerned with Judah and with Israel. He was concerned with bringing everyone in through them so that they would be the ones who fed and nourished the nations.

That fruitfulness, that expectation that God has is stated explicitly in Isaiah 5, verse 7.

For the vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel and the men of Judah, his delightful plant. Again, in Ezekiel 19 .10,

your mother was like a vine and your vineyard planted by the waters and it was fruitful and it was full of branches because of the abundant waters.

Ezekiel is looking back on a period of Israelite history and he's reminiscing. He's saying that you used to be like that,

Judah, Israel, you used to bear fruit.

The nations would come and would try to be nourished at the branches of Israel. Ezekiel's looking back with nostalgia, but also with great lament.

Ezekiel lived during a period of time that Israel was not fruitful. Israel was fruitless, poisoned, and it's why during and at the end of Ezekiel's ministry, they were deported and exiled to a foreign country because they had fallen from their purpose.

Ezekiel's the man who's looking back and saying that, yeah, you were meant to do this, but you're not doing this. The pitiful tale of Israel in all the

Old Testament is that she was meant to bear fruit and be faithful to God, and she played the harlot with every nation.

She went on top of every hilltop and sacrificed every idol. She became just like Sodom, offering the poisoned grapes of Gomorrah to the nations instead of fruit for God.

Instead of righteousness, instead of holiness, she offered them poison, and God is coming to punish

Israel because of her sin. Now we see that in the text that something is happening to Judah and Israel.

She's falling away from her purpose, which is going to necessitate this judgment that is going to be brought on her in the

New Testament. Notice how the passage in Ezekiel continues to develop. It had strong branches, had fit for scepters of rulers.

Can you imagine that, a grapevine that's so strong that a ruler's scepter would not break the branch?

And its height was raised above the clouds so that it was seen in its height with the mass of its branches, but it was plucked up in fury.

It was cast down to the ground, and the east wind dried up its fruit, and its strong branch was torn off so that it was withered.

The fire consumed it, and now it is planted in the wilderness, and it dry in a thirsty land, and the fire has gone out from its branch, and it has consumed its shoots and its fruit so that there is not in it a strong branch or a scepter to rule.

Ezekiel's talking about the moment where the Babylonians came because of decades and decades of faithlessness and fruitlessness, and they came and they besieged the city of Jerusalem, and they starved the people out, and then eventually they came in, and through multiple successive stages of exportation, they deported the people of Israel and brought them into the land of Babylon in chains.

This is not an accident in covenantal history. This is because they turned from their God, and God abandoned them to exile, a 700 -mile walk from Jerusalem to Babylon in rusty chains because of their faithlessness.

The Babylonians came and they looted everything. They took every treasure from the land.

They took every storehouse that was stored inside of Solomon's temple, and then the last thing that they did after they deposed the king and batted out his eyes and made him walk blind, that journey to Babylon, is they set the temple on fire, they set the city on fire, and they left it in utter ruin.

Ezekiel prophesied this. He prophesied that the vine is going to be violently ripped up and left utterly destroyed, replanted in a wilderness land called

Babylon, but with no scepter and no king. Now, this is not the only time that this reality happens.

It happens in the Old Testament where the temple is burned, but it also happens in the New Testament.

We see after the people come back to the land and they rebuild the walls under Nehemiah and they rebuild the city, and then they rebuild the temple under Ezra, it says that the old men weeped when the new temple was constructed because it did not have the former glory of Solomon's temple.

If you remember Solomon's temple when it was first inaugurated, when it was first, the day that it was first put into use,

God rained fire down from heaven to demonstrate that his power was present there. You remember the tabernacle before that, that God rained fire down from heaven to demonstrate that I am present in this building, but when

Ezra's temple was finished, everybody stood back and everybody looked at the sky and nothing happened.

And the old men wept because they knew the former glory of that old temple.

They knew that something was different. All the way into the book of Malachi, the last book in the

Hebrew Bible, you get the people of Israel not growing in religious fervor, but growing in apathy.

Read the book of Malachi, it's fascinating. God says, you don't love me, and they said, oh, how did we not love you?

That's sort of the attitude I'm adding onto it. The whole book is, how have we robbed you of your tithes?

How have we not loved you? How have we not served you? The people are in this place of great apathy when it comes to the

Lord, and that persists even outside of the Old Testament into the 200s BC.

They were an apathetic group of people who were conquered by one superpower after another, after another, after another, and there's nothing revivalistic happening in this people.

Nothing that's causing them to yearn for the things of God, like in the days of David and the days of Solomon.

Nothing pointing them back to orthodoxy and faithfulness. They're just sort of languidly going from one superpower to the next, to the next, to the next, until a group of Pharisees begin.

In the 200s, that's when the Pharisees as a movement was started. And they were started for a good reason, because the people of Israel were so apathetic to the things of God.

They were started as a revival movement, as a movement to help the people become more faithful to God.

They were there to whip the people up into shape. And as revival movements tend to go, it was perverted, so that by the time of the

New Testament, they're abusive. They're trying to beat people into the kingdom.

They're trying to win people to the God of love with cold -hearted, dead religion, so that from the 200s until Jesus came, the situation got worse and worse.

The vine withered and withered. The fruit was choked out. So when

Jesus came to the temple, He could call it fruitless. When He looked at the city, He could call it fruitless.

He looked at this glorious thing that God had set apart to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation out of all the nations on earth, and it was dead, doubly dead even.

And Jesus places the majority of the blame on the Pharisees. Matthew chapter 21, 33 through 43,

He's leaning into Isaiah 5. He said, listen to another parable. Usually when

Jesus does that, you need to run for cover because He's talking about you, and this is exactly what is going on here.

Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard and put a wall around it and dug a wine press in it and built a tower, and he rented it out to the vine growers.

And he went on a journey, and when the harvest time approached, he sent his slaves to the vine grower to receive his produce.

And the vine growers took his slaves and beat one and they killed another and they stoned a third. Again, he sent another group of slaves, larger than the first, and they did the same thing.

But afterward, he sent his son to them, saying that they will respect my son.

But when the vine growers saw the son, they said to themselves, this is the heir, come, let us kill him and seize his inheritance.

And they took him and they threw him out of the vineyard and they killed him. Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what do you think he will do to those vine growers?

And they said to him, he will bring those wretches to a wretched end and will rent out the vineyard to other vine growers who will pay him the proceeds at the proper season.

And Jesus looks at them and says, have you not read the scriptures? You just pronounced judgment on yourself.

You're the ones who killed the slaves that I sent to you. You're the ones who killed the prophets that I sent to you. You're the ones who killed the servants of God that I sent to you.

And now you're the ones that are going to put me on a cross and kill me. What do you think God's going to do to you? And he says, therefore,

I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing the fruit of it.

And in a rare moment of clarity, the Pharisees recognized he was talking about them. The kingdom is going to be taken from them.

Those wretches are going to be put to a wretched end. That's not metaphor. Jesus is talking about a destruction that's going to happen in the first century.

That's going to come upon the people who crucified God's one and only son. That would make

Babylon's invasion look like child's play. And this is all throughout the scriptures, this idea that this is coming, but no one seemed to be looking.

Psalm 80, 16, this talking about the vine, it burned with fire and it was cut down and they perished at the rebuke of your countenance.

James in the New Testament says he's talking to the Jews here. He says, come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries, which are coming upon you.

John the Baptist says this to the Pharisees and John and Matthew three, the axe is already at the root of the tree.

Therefore, every tree that is not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand and he will thoroughly clear out his threshing floor and he will gather his wheat into the barn, but he will burn the chaff with unquenchable fire.

John the Baptist is saying you are the chaff that's getting ready to undergo the fires of God.

Jesus in Matthew 22 in a parable says that the king was enraged. The king in that parable is God. The people who didn't attend the wedding feast are them.

The meaning is obvious. The king was enraged and he sent his armies and he destroyed those murderers and he set their city on fire.

It's Matthew 22. That's not metaphor. That's not a wordplay.

It's not a word picture. He's prophesying what's getting ready to happen. Matthew 24 says that abomination that causes desolation is getting ready to happen.

Luke, who's a Gentile, helps us Gentiles out because we don't think like Jews. What does the abomination of desolation mean?

He says, but when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then you will know that her desolation is near. When you men that are walking with me, when

Jesus looks at his disciples and says, you will see this, he doesn't mean us. He doesn't mean us 2 ,000 years from now.

He means you men will see Jerusalem burnt to the ground with the armies surrounding it.

Matthew 24, 32, and 35 says, learn from the parable of the fig tree, which we already know he's pointed directly at Jerusalem.

When its branches already become tender and put out its leaves, you know that the summer is near. So you too, when you see all these things, and you can read

Matthew 24 in all of the tribulations and trials and punishments that are going to come upon that generation,

Jesus says, truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all of these things take place.

Heaven and earth can pass away, but my words will never pass away.

He's talking about judgment that's coming on the people of Judah, and he does so at the

Mount of Olives, which is the same place he's talking about one day later in John 15. One day before he's talking about Jerusalem's downfall, do we not think in John 15 that that has some bearing, especially the same location that he's talking on the content of his message?

When he says every branch in me that does not bear fruit, God takes away.

Apart from me, you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me is thrown away, cast into the fire he's talking about.

He's saying that God is the great vine dresser of Judah. He's saying that Judah was supposed to be a faithful, fruitful vine.

He's saying that Judah became unfruitful and threw away the blessings of that relationship with God, and because of that, she will be ripped out.

Just like the first Babylon who came, God is going to gather together his armies, which is the

Roman Empire, and in 68 AD, the

Romans came marching into the land of Israel and one town after another, they set it to fire.

And the people of Caesarea ran to the next town, and then the people of Philippi ran to, or not Philippi, the people of other towns,

Bethesda, ran to another town, and eventually everyone ended up in Jerusalem, because it was the last town, and in 68

AD, the Romans surrounded it. And what happened, you can read in the annals of Josephus, is awful.

There was inner fighting, so that by the time the Romans broke through the city gates in AD 69 and early

AD 70, there were dead bodies already piled up as high as the city gates. I've said this before,

I think the most shocking example is a woman that Josephus records eating her own infant. There was priests who were taking over the temple who went in and murdered the other priests because they thought that it was their job to be the priest at that time, so they defiled the temple with the blood of the

Levites. When Rome came in, the people were starving to death, disoriented, and falling apart.

Jesus' words that this generation would be lawless and their hearts would grow cold came to pass.

The last thing that Rome did as an act of providence by God was they set fire to the temple. They killed all of the remaining people, and then the ones who were weak and who were sick, they took back to Rome in shackles and chains.

Jesus said, this mountain, if you have faith, will be cast into the sea. He was looking at the mountain that housed the city of Jerusalem.

It was cast into the sea. Rome plundered it. Rome took their people and put them on their ships, and they cast it into the sea, and they took it all the way back to the city of Rome.

All of the judgment language in the New Testament is aimed squarely at this people who had turned from their

God. Isaiah talks about it, John the Baptist, Jesus, James, other Old Testament prophets, psalmists,

New Testament writers. It's there. Now, that's not a very happy sermon, and at this point, it's not very relevant.

It's a history lesson. The thing I want us to remember as we look at the underpinnings of this, these were the chosen people.

These were the people who had all the blessings, all the gifts. They had the temple. They had the scriptures. They had everything.

If they lived in our time, they would have had the commentaries, and they would have had the books, and they would have had the apps, and they would have had the

MyCanonPlus app. They would have had all this stuff, and yet it was this generation that turned from the living

God. As we close, I want us to remember that we're not special.

We were grafted in. It wasn't because of us. We were twigs that He decided out of His mere grace to graft us into the vine.

We only live because we're in connection to Christ. We're only faithful. We only love

God because we are in relationship with Jesus. Let us not, brothers and sisters, fall for the same temptation as Judah.

Let us not become consumed with our religion. Let us not become consumed with our pietism.

Let us not become consumed with ourselves because the same warning hangs over us.

If we do not abide in Him, then we will be removed. The only hope we have as Christians is abiding in Christ.

We do not have a self -centered hope. If you want that, become a Buddhist. You can wear your little orange jumpsuit, and you can work really hard, and then you can die and go to hell.

If you want self -centered religion, go to Mormonism. If you want self -centered religion, go to every other religion on earth that says we can climb the mountain up to God.

Christianity is the only religion, as C .S. Lewis says, that said God came down to us. He saved us by His mere grace and mere good pleasure, not because of our faithfulness in spite of it.

Let us, dear friends, cling to the gospel of grace. You and I are not good. He is good.

Our only life comes in abiding in Him, and we'll talk more about that next week. Let's pray.

Lord, Your treasured people were put under the most astonishing woe and curse imaginable.

It says that no other people have ever been punished like that generation was punished. Lord, let us not take for granted where we now stand.

Lord, let us not take for granted the necessity, the daily, minute -by -minute necessity of abiding in Christ.

Lord, we need

You like the deserts need rain. We need

You like we need oxygen. Even more so, apart from You, we can do nothing.

And we will do nothing. Lord, stir our hearts and stir our affections for You so that we would cling to You and trust in You in all things.